Just Google It

He inspected the orange juice he was holding up. “Just google it!” it said, “this juice is guaranteed rain forest free; Google has made sure of that!” He got kind of annoyed by the two exclamation marks, and thought that the word google had lost its meaning. He remembered when it just was a way of saying “search it”. No more. Now it meant everything. He scanned the bar code of the juice and found out this was not the kind he liked, by comparing it to the bar code of the juice he drank in Norway.

He knew what he wanted, just some Jarlsberg, smoked ham, a piece of good bread and a milk, but everything was so different here. He didn’t know the wares, how they looked, so they were difficult to find. After walking aimlessly around just looking at stuff he decided to cut to the case. He logged on to Google and made a search within the store for wares similar to what he wanted. Even though he didn’t know where they were he’d find them using GoogleStore, he had seen this Monoprix was Google Certified. It was no longer difficult to find what he wanted. “Google has made sure of that!”

He didn’t exactly look forward to paying for the groceries; French had never been his language. Standing in the line he noticed the old couple in front of him were German and felt some strange relief, at least he wasn’t the only one not fluent in French in the store. They were bying lot of stuff and when the lady told them the price, “soixante-onze ¥€$ quatre-vingt-dix-sept” his GoogleBabelfish quickly translated it to seventy-two ¥€$ and ninty-seven cents. They didn’t seem to understand that however, or maybe they just weren’t connected. Maybe they were Luddites or something. Anyway he had to help them, so that he eventually got to pay for his stuff – he was hungry – so he translated it back into German. “Zweiundsiebzig ¥€$ siebenundneunzig cent” he said somewhat louder than he needed. The German woman looked surprised at him and nodded a “danke” at him.

Walking out of the store he held the 5 ¥€$ he got as change to his eyes. He had always liked the picture of Fukuzawa Yukichi and Abraham Lincon standing next to each other with Notre Dame in the background. At least Google hadn’t gotten to the money yet.